I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately--as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does "illegible" still mean too messy to read? The day after Donald Trump's second Inauguration, my verbal cognition kept glitching: I got an e-mail from the children's-clothing company Hanna Andersson and read the name as "Hamas"; on the street, I thought "hot yoga" was "hot dogs"; on the subway, a theatre poster advertising "Jan. Ticketing" said "Jia Tolentino" to me. Even the words that I might use to more precisely describe the sensation of "losing it" elude me.

Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash is the book that launched a thousand startups. It was the first book to use the Hindu term avatar to describe a virtual representation of a person, it coined the term "metaverse", and was one of Mark Zuckerberg's pieces of required reading for new executives at Facebook a decade before he changed the focus of the entire company to attempt to build Stephenson's fictional world in reality. The plot revolves around an image that, when viewed in the metaverse, hijacks the viewer's brain, maiming or killing them. In the fiction of the world, the image crashes the brain, presenting it with an input that simply cannot be correctly processed. Perhaps the first clear example came four years earlier, in British SF writer David Langford's short story BLIT, which imagines a terrorist attack using a "basilisk", images which contain "implicit programs which the human equipment cannot safely run". In a sequel to that story, published in Nature in 1999, Langford draws earlier parallels, even pulling in Monty Python's Flying Circus, "with its famous sketch about the World's Funniest Joke that causes all hearers to laugh themselves to death".

The latter suggests that to infer what someone means, an agent constructs a rationale for the observed behaviour of others. Communication then requires two agents labour under similar compulsions and have similar experiences (construct similar solutions to similar tasks). Any non-human intelligence may construct solutions such that any rationale for their behaviour (and thus the meaning of their signals) is outside the scope of what a human is inclined to notice or comprehend. Further, the more compressed a signal, the closer it will appear to random noise. Another intelligence may possess the ability to compress information to the extent that, to us, their signals would appear indistinguishable from noise (an explanation for The Fermi Paradox). To facilitate predictive accuracy an AGI would tend to more compressed representations of the world, making any rationale for their behaviour more difficult to comprehend for the same reason. Communication with and control of an AGI may subsequently necessitate not only human-like compulsions and experiences, but imposed cognitive impairment.

Cormac McCarthy is best known to the world as a writer of novels. These include Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. At the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) he is a research colleague and thought of in complementary terms. At SFI we have been searching for the expression of these scientific interests in his novels and we maintain a furtive tally of their covert manifestations and demonstrations in his prose. Over the last two decades Cormac and I have been discussing the puzzles and paradoxes of the unconscious mind. Foremost among them, the fact that the very recent and "uniquely" human capability of near infinite expressive power arising through a combinatorial grammar is built on the foundations of a far more ancient animal brain. How have these two evolutionary systems become reconciled? Cormac expresses this tension as the deep suspicion, perhaps even contempt, that the primeval unconscious feels toward the upstart, conscious language. In this article Cormac explores this idea through processes of dream and infection. It is a discerning and wide-ranging exploration of ideas and challenges that our research community has only recently dared to start addressing through complexity science. I call it the Kekulé Problem because among the myriad instances of scientific problems solved in the sleep of the inquirer Kekulé's is probably the best known.

There's always one game at E3 that proves, counter to the general theme of the show, bigger isn't always better. This year, a tiny studio named Compulsion found itself thrust into the limelight after its project We Happy Few caused a considerable splash at Microsoft's press conference. But as a black comedy set in a dystopian Britain being destroyed by a vast group hallucination, it may now take on more profound and pressing connotations following last night's result. For some, this strange combination of 1984, A Clockwork Orange and Bioshock feels very much the game of the moment. The opening of the E3 demo, which momentarily silenced the usual energetic whooping, evoked the spirit of another wonderful introductory sequence, from Terry Gilliam's seminal 1985 film Brazil.